Thirty
Baa Baa Black Sheep
The days thinned and blew dry again till they felt reminiscent of a true Canadian autumn. Everyone welcomed the coolness, none more so than Dan. Colours swirled in the air as the leaves changed, the world dissolving
in primary hues, becoming a Tom Thompson painting for the briefest of moments. A week later they were gone, leaving a barren landscape, the circus having fled town for yet another year, the clowns and acrobats and jugglers put away with the tigers and elephants.
Duty done.
Two significant birthdays were celebrated back-to-back. Ked turned fifteen and grew one step closer to manhood. The previous day, Lester turned sixteen, making him legally responsible for choosing his place of residence. Applications were pending to make Donny his legal guardian.
“They wouldn’t even call me Lester,” he griped of his mother and stepfather during his recent incarceration. “I told them I’m not Richard anymore. Why couldn’t they understand that?”
Dan laughed softly. “How does it feel to be home?”
Lester shook his head. “Why did I ever leave?”
“Story of the world,” Dan told him. “One day you’ll figure it out.”
He’d enrolled in a local high school, to everyone’s relief. For all intents and purposes, it was as though he’d suddenly resurfaced from nowhere. Except that no one can be nowhere, Dan reminded himself.
They were outside on the balcony. Trevor tippled a Scotch on his knee, while Donny tilted a cigarette at the sky. Dan looked back inside the condo, where Ked and Lester hovered over a laptop on the kitchen counter. Lester’s jeans were settled well down around his hips, exposing a good deal of his underwear-encased buttocks.
“Do you approve of that kind of dress?” Dan asked.
“Approve?” Donny repeated, exhaling a wreath of smoke. “No, but this is how all the other kids dress and I refuse to become a censorial parent, even step-parent. I draw the line at naked flesh in public, however.”
They turned to each other and laughed.
“How quickly we grow old,” Donny said.
“Amen to that,” Dan agreed.
They both looked off for a moment. Ked’s voice reached them from inside.
“Don’t go away again, okay?” he told Lester. “You’re the closest thing to a brother I have.”
“I’m not going anywhere for a very long time,” Lester told him. “No worries, bro.”
Dan smiled. “Weren’t you concerned about being questioned for harbouring a minor?” he asked.
Donny, permanently wreathed in calm again, blew a considered exhalation of smoke and shrugged.
“Not really. His ID says he’s eighteen.”
Dan laughed then grew serious again. “So what do you think about getting him to help with the case?”
Donny frowned, the only outward sign of inner perturbation. “I don’t like it, but I’ll let you ask him. If he says no, then you have to back off. He’s out of all that now and doesn’t want to be reminded of it.”
“Agreed,” Dan said.
Donny shook his head. “A former police officer, huh?”
Dan nodded. He thought of his recent conversation with Ed Burch. Pfeiffer’s father had been the chief’s best friend when they joined the force together, and later became his right-hand man. But the branch divided, one going up the light side while the other chose the dark.
“I gather deals were made that allowed him to disappear with dignity rather than spend his life in jail,” Ed told Dan.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t stop him from doing his dirty deeds.”
“Bad cops are nothing new,” Ed said. “There are two kinds of people attracted to the uniform. The first come in as idealists. Some of them actually want to change the world.” He shrugged. “Ideals seldom last, however. Sometimes they get tempered by a more realistic outlook with time and experience. Others become soured. It’s too bad, but it happens. You see them all the time, burning with rage underneath the surface. Rogue officers. Unpleasant. Unpredictable.”
“I’ve met plenty of those.”
“Then there are the other kind who come to the force looking for trouble. They want power and demand respect without necessarily earning it. We try to weed them out in training. Still, what it comes down to is the nature of the beast. Is it black-hearted or just weak-willed? The first type will always be trouble. The second can surprise you. You can appeal to their better natures. Let them know they can help others if they try.”
Dan nodded.
“But in my experience, a rogue officer will always be a rogue officer.”
“Which were you?”
“I was an idealist who hit the wall early and decided that I had joined for the wrong reasons. So I quit. Simple as that.”
“Meaning you operate on principles.”
Ed smiled. “Thank you for that.”
It had been a telling conversation.
Dan stood side by side with Donny now, staring out across the city. His new home lay somewhere just this side of the river. He’d stopped by again the other night, placing his hand against the brick, trying to envisage a future there. The images wouldn’t come. Maybe Domingo was wrong after all. The future was impossible to conjure, nothing there to scry. Time was immutable. It formed one second at a time, the present sloughing off the skin of the past. How could you read into something that didn’t exist yet?
Still, he had to give her credit: she’d been right about Jags and the light that went off and on. Self-extinction. Auto-asphyxiation. That was something, at least. And then there was Little Boy Blue, who disappeared into thin air. It’s like he doesn’t really exist, she said. Perhaps he hadn’t really existed for years, not since his childhood was stolen from him.
Dan had read the stats. He knew what happened to abused kids. Suicide was common; others became drug addicts or alcoholics. Others lost all interest in life, a form of non-existence that must have seemed preferable to what they had.
He looked over at Donny.
“They say there are three things necessary for sexual abuse to occur: opportunity, power, and secrecy. He had all three. First of all, he was the boy’s father. On top of that, he had friends in high places. If it wasn’t for Ed Burch, this would have gotten nowhere. It was the chief of police who finally agreed to name him. Unofficially, of course. It was the main reason young Pfeiffer got away with so much — the chief felt he owed him because of his father. He still can’t be charged with offences that occurred before the date he was granted clemency. That can’t happen.”
Donny nodded sagely. “I understand.” He pondered this for a second. “Just how big is this investigation going to get? Politicians, celebrities … who’s next, royalty?”
“Hush your mouth,” Dan told him.
When the question was put to him, and he was assured that the man who abused him would be put away for a long time, Lester agreed to identify him. The clothes he’d been wearing the night he was raped were bundled in a locker in a friend’s basement. If they were still there, as he believed, forensics would be able to find physical evidence linking the man to the crime.
“Does this make me a snitch?” Lester asked Dan as they walked up the steps of the police headquarters together.
“Guess you could say that.”
“Good. It’s my turn to make him feel bad.”
“Keep your mind on justice rather than revenge,” Dan told him. “This is about making things right for you and making sure it doesn’t happen to others.”
Lester considered this. “Uncle Dan, how come you’re so smart?”
Dan was glad it wasn’t going to be a live identification parade, even through one-way glass. He waited, a prayer hovering on his lips as Lester looked over the photographs laid out on the desk before him. Despite Donny’s trepidation about letting the boy face his past, they both knew it needed to be done. In the year Lester had spent with Donny, he’d grown from a grasping, devious adolescent into a yo
ung man with a sense of self-worth. Dan was fairly sure this wasn’t going to hurt him. Rather, he suspected it would help Lester walk away from whatever hold the past had over him. Hadn’t he been smart enough to realize that any chance of having a normal life with his mother was impossible as long as she stayed with the monster she had married? He might take a while getting there, Dan felt, but he knew which way the wind was blowing. No, Lester was going to help put away the man who had raped him, once and for all. And the world would be better for it.
They watched him flick over a page then glance back at it. With a look of gratification, he put his finger to the bottom of the page. It looked like an older version of Constable Pfeiffer, the father who had left his family when his son was still a baby.
“That’s him.”
“Are you sure?” asked the female detective.
“I am sure,” Lester said, without a hint of emotion. He looked up at her and nodded.
Germ alerted Dan to the updated blog on Gaetan Bélanger’s website. While Pfeiffer had added occasional contributions to the site under Bélanger’s name, including his own death notice, the real Gaetan had prepped his final entry to be automatically released.
In it, he outlined his plan to kill Little Boy Blue and then himself. The taunting tone was gone. There was a sense of finality to the words.
When you read this, I will be dead. It’s time to end this torture. I am going to kill the person I thought was a friend, and then I am going to kill myself. I tried hard to avoid him, but he found me. I don’t know how he did.
What Father Thierry did to me was wrong, but what was done to him was worse. I don’t believe in love. I don’t believe in forgiveness. But I did not kill him. It was Pierre. I am going to kill Pierre then I am going to kill myself.
He wrote briefly about his tortured life, about being sent from one home to another before finally feeling he’d found a place to belong when he became an altar boy at the church where Father Thierry worked. Sadly, the feeling didn’t last. It was a typical Lost Boy story, one Dan related to. After the sexual abuse, the boy grew up hating his life and everyone who tried to befriend him.
“I know I don’t really have any friends,” Gaetan wrote. “And I don’t think I feel anything any more, but I still like Pierre, despite what he did.”
Sadly, the one person he’d trusted turned out to be his worst enemy. He probably hadn’t once been allowed to choose his own fate in his short life, Dan reflected.
Domingo was beside him while he read the entry. They were discussing their own pasts, how they’d both suffered through their familial relationships.
“Yet we grew up to be decent human beings,” Domingo said. She looked Dan in the eye. “We were lucky, of course. We still have the capacity to love and trust.”
Dan nodded.
“Even though we like to joke about our early sexual proclivities, I sometimes wonder if those urges were because of the people we missed out on building relationships with.”
“How so?”
“My father left home when I was young. My mother didn’t want me, so I found someone who did. I just wonder if your urge to have sex with older men as a teenager was some way of making up for your father’s drinking, for his abandoning you emotionally.”
Dan shrugged. “You may be right. To tell you the truth, I don’t worry about it now. I like who I am.”
She looked at him. “Good. That’s important. You and I are survivors. We know who we are and what matters to us. What matters is today, not yesterday.”
“It’s the Gaetan Bélangers of the world we have to worry about,” Dan agreed. “I just wish …”
She waited. “What, honey?”
Dan drew a breath. “I just wish he would have talked to me that day. Maybe I could have said something to change his mind. Are there people who are past help? Too far gone for hope?”
Domingo shrugged. “No one can be nowhere.”
Epilogue:
Unhappy Endings
Jags dropped by. He wore a linen suit and casual slacks. White cotton. Deliberately disobeying the fall fashion injunctive: no whites after Labour Day. Perhaps he thought the seasons stood still for him too.
Dan listened as he explained how he wanted to take him on permanently. Thanks to the interest stirred by his book, Jags had a new recording contract in the works. That meant studio time and eventually a tour. It could be worldwide if the response was big enough.
“But what would I do for you?” Dan asked. “You don’t need me to keep you safe any more.”
“Maybe I just like having you around. I still need someone to tell me what’s what.”
Dan leaned back in his chair, thought briefly of touring with a rock band, backstage passes, visas, vetting the press. “It’s not for me,” he said.
Jags reacted predictably, offering him more money.
“Nah,” Dan said. “Besides, I don’t like feeling that I can be bought. I’m still a puritan about some things. A little struggle is good for the soul. Money can’t buy happiness.”
“No, but it can get you a really nice Porsche Carrera.”
Dan waited.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Jags said. “I’m sick of my life, Dan. I just don’t know what else to be.”
“Why not go away for a while? Somewhere they don’t know who you are.”
“Hey! There’s no such place. I’ll break your bones if you say there is.”
Dan laughed.
“You know what they say: tough guys don’t dance. I ain’t moving anywhere. Besides, I have to finish the recording. I’ve got at least one more great one inside me. I can feel it.”
“I hope that gives you reason to stay sober,” Dan said. “If you do, you could be back on top in no time.”
Jags snorted. “Yeah, for a year or two. You know what these entertainment industry assholes are like. When you’re up they offer you the moon, but when you’re down they can’t remember your name or whether you ever existed.”
“I don’t see you being that low on the totem pole.”
“Don’t fool yourself. It’s money we’re talking about, not fame or artistic reputation. If I can’t make someone a buck, I’m as good as dead.”
They hadn’t really discussed the events of the previous few weeks. Dan thought they weren’t going to when Jags suddenly mentioned Pfeiffer.
“It was that thing about making him take the host that really got me, you know? I can’t say I’ve never been inside a church, but I can guarantee you I’ve never taken the host with anybody. I’m a devout Jew, for god’s sakes.”
Dan thought for a moment. “That’s not what your book said.”
Jags laughed. “Of course not. You think my rock-and-roll readers want to hear I’m a man of spirit?”
“So that story about growing up in smalltown Ontario wasn’t true?”
“I was born on a kibbutz in Israel. Both my parents lived and died there. I have no family in Canada. The only part of my past I still have is a picture of them at their wedding.”
Dan pondered this. “Maybe you should tell the truth next time. That’s far more colourful than saying you were raised in a middle-class home in Belleville.”
“Colour I don’t need at this point in my life.”
The house was finished. Dan stood by the window in the newly completed sunroom. The place was amazingly still and quiet. It almost seemed like a dream home. But then that was what it was intended to be.
Two coffee mugs sat on the table. Dan’s was empty, Trevor’s half-full. They’d been up all night. Dan felt the fatigue.
He glanced at Trevor over the horizon of the tabletop, as though it represented the border of a possible but unimagined world, something beyond the ordinary, everyday world that confined and defined. He felt as if he were standing at the edge of the sea, trying to imagine what lay over the horizon, away from this place where everything ended.
He’d sent Ked off to his mother’s again. Weekends were convenient for serious dis
cussions like this. Ked would be heartbroken, he knew. There was nothing he could do about that. It was his own heart he should have been guarding.
Dan shook his head. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, if that’s what you think.”
Trevor’s brow furrowed. “I’d never think you would resort to emotional blackmail.” He paused. “I just wish you’d give it a chance. Live here for a while and see how it feels.”
“This was supposed to be our home. I can’t live here without you.”
“You could try it for a while.”
Dan looked down the length of the house then back at Trevor. He shrugged. “My heart won’t be in it. Besides, I can’t afford the mortgage. I just realized I’m not cut out to be anybody’s bodyguard. I’ve got to go back to my routine of finding deadbeat dads and other scum.”
“You’ll make money. You’re good at what you do.”
Dan looked off again. “I know.”
Trevor searched for the words that would inevitably cut the cord between them. “I don’t want to be the one to drag everyone down. You and Ked have a great life here in the city. It suits you both far more than you know.”
“We could live apart. I’d fly out to see you on the weekends.”
Trevor smiled sadly. “I can’t have you part-time, Dan. I couldn’t do that. And it wouldn’t solve anything. I don’t belong here. You have to let me go.”
Dan saw it now, how Trevor was like a caged bird beating its wings against the bars, trying to remain tranquil, but all the while terrified and wanting to be free.
“I need to go back to my forest, my trees. Joe’s ashes.”
“When?”
“Soon. But if you want me to leave right away …”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Trevor inclined his head. “It’s got to be soon. No use dragging it out. This will be hard on both of us. Not to mention Ked. Your son and I have grown very fond of one another.”
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